The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (U.S. CBP) has started a pilot of their biometrics program at Aruba Airport which involves the use of facial biometric technology to verify the identities of passengers re-entering the United States from Aruba.

The pilot will be tested on a daily Delta flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport.

After the successful implementation by U.S. CBP of biometric identification pilots at several U.S. airports, U.S. CBP chose Aruba Airport as the first airport outside of the U.S. to conduct a trial of their facial recognition biometric technology.

Mr. James Fazio, Aruba Airport Authority N.V. CEO:

“We are very pleased that U.S. CBP has chosen to pilot this technology at Aruba Airport. We have been implementing this technology over the past several years at several of the airport’s border control points, and this pilot will be instrumental in taking our airport to the next levels of security and passenger service; and put us on a path to becoming one of the “best-in class” preclearance airports.

“Our past experiences with biometrics have been very successful and we are looking forward to working in collaboration with U.S. CBP on their pilot project, and we fully expect they will be successful in a full implementation of this technology.”

Aruba is already big on biometrics. Three years ago it started Aruba Happy Flow, a biometric screening program that means that at all passenger touch-points the passenger’s face image is the identification token.